Came back from New Zealand a few weeks ago with two novels. My sister lent me her copy of
Carry Me Down by Irish/Australian M J Hyland and my friend Pete, New Zealander Craig Marriner's
Southern Style. Two novels by (notional) antipodeans, one set in rural Ireland, the other in London. Both second books by relatively young writers. That's just about all they have in common. I started reading them in tandem, something I hardly ever do with fiction books. I'd read a bit of one, then a bit of the other. But then Southern Style, which is a kind of thriller, took over and I raced through to the end before returning to Carry Me Down.
It's told entirely from the point of view of an eccentric eleven year old boy, an only child, and as such is a remarkable achievement. The tone never falters, you never once doubt the veracity of John Egan's voice, you share his confusions, his agonies, his increasing alienation, as he attempts to understand what is happening to him and to his parents, to find a place in the world. It's also one of the grimmest books I've read, and affected me so strongly that at times I had to put it aside for a while. And yet ...
Southern Style is about a group of twenty-something antips in contemporary London. They mostly work in a warehouse where electronic games and the machines that play them are disbursed to the masses. When they aren't partying, that is. The plot, which is intricate and for the most part deftly handled, deals with an attempt by some crims to organise a heist from the warehouse, though you don't really find this out until about two thirds of the way through. The point of view shifts from character to character, with an authorial voice drifting in to tell connecting parts of the story. It's as virtuostic in its way as Hyland's performance. And yet ...
Endings are hard things to pull off. Both books essay an upbeat end and neither is really convincing. You feel the intervention of some other intelligence, which is of course the intelligence that has crafted the book in the first place, but that moment when it becomes, as it were, visible, and visibly manipulative, is disconcerting. Suddenly the schematics start to show, as if bones protruded through flesh. Suddenly what should be reassuring, even comforting - the happy ending - starts to look contrived. You feel as you often do after a movie has ended, as if the sensibility of film has somehow infiltrated the world of books.
I'm reminded of something W G Sebald, who never hid his distaste for the traditional novel, said of his own writing:
It's the opposite of suspending disbelief and being swept along by the action, which is perhaps not the highest form of mental activity; it's to constantly ask, 'What happened to these people, what might they have felt like?' You can generate a similar state of mind in the reader by making them uncertain.
